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The story which Wodehouse seems to have regarded as his funniest —with some reason—concerned a detective novelist, but ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ was primarily satire on ghost stories with subordinate satires on mysteries and slushy romance. The opening is almost appalling in its realistic reply to the normal ghost story beginning:
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ asked Mr Mulliner abruptly. I weighed the question thoughtfully. I was a little surprised, for nothing in our previous conversation had suggested the topic.
‘Well’, I replied, I don’t like them, if that’s what you mean. I was once butted by one as a child.’ (World of Mulliner, 117.)
As the story develops it raises the question of environment and change of predominant literary influence to which Wodehouse adverts in several Mulliner stories. Environmentalism was in many ways fashionable in Wodehouse’s youth and early maturity—the America of his day was still looking respectfully at the shadow of Frederick Jackson Turner when it read history—and while Wodehouse apparently concedes much to the environmentalist he was a little slower in picking up the unconscious influences of his surroundings than most writers. Apart from occasional lapses into American usages, verbal or social, the main impact of America on him is, as I have tried to imply earlier, a fairly subtle and largely undetected one. Orwell saw American effects on Wodehouse in terms which suggest a parallel between Wodehouse and the classic American immigrant: the home country is vivid in the memory, but frozen with virtually no allowance for change from the date of departure. But in fact Wodehouse made long sojourns in England before World War II.
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- Copyright © 1976 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Wodehouse to Townend, 1 Oct. 1924, Performing Flea, 29. He made it his selection for My Funniest Story, an anthology of stories chosen by their authors (1932).
2 The story is symptomatic of allied themes in other Wodehouse stories. The Bishop of Stortford and the Headmaster of Harchester revert to schoolboy days in ‘The Bishop's Move’ (Ibid., Ch. 4), under the influence of an overdose of Mulliner's Buck‐U‐Uppo (when Wodehouse tried out the idea again in ‘Gala Night’, Ibid., Ch. 27, it failed because of the absence of the time‐dimension). In ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’ a boy's airgun has similar effects on Lord Emsworth, Beach and even Lady Constance Keeble. Very sensibly, the whole atmosphere here is entirely one of elation with adolescent fears of reprisal from authority; not in any way psychological unease. The other motif in ‘The Voice from the Past’ is sex‐relationship, Sacheverell moving from submissive to dominant to submissive. Wodehouse frequently enjoyed portraying tough woman and clinging man, employing exactly the stock language of the reverse idiom. See notably The Girl on the Boat, with its sub‐plot on the romance of Eustace Hignett and Jane Hubbard. There is a suggestion of this sort of thing in the attitudes of Honoria Glossop, Heloise Pringle and even Florence Craye to Bertie. although the compliment is not returned. In this genre again, however, Wodehouse enjoyed surprising the old customers: mousy little man rules the roost when he marries big game‐huntress in ‘There's Always Golf’ (Lord Emsworth and Others, Ch. 5), which among other things derives from the great execution done on Ethel M. Dell in this story.
3 ‘Jeeves and the Yule‐Tide Spirit’. ‘Episode of the Dog McIntosh’. ‘Jeeves and the Kid Clementina’, Jeeves in the Offing.
4 Ibid., 137. The Baconian craze obtains a magnificent profile in the story.
5 Over Seventy, 57.